The Bali You Remember

Uluwatu – 10th Jan, 2012, 11:30

It is your birthday. You are fifty-three years old. You still surf the world.

Today you find yourself eight degrees below the equator, standing on a cliff’s edge at the rich people’s villas at Uluwatu overlooking the break at the Temple. The 100 metre sheer cliff makes your knees oily. You have your surfboard under your arm and a waterproof backpack on your back. You are going to climb down the cliff’s secret south path and you are going to walk, surf and paddle the entire Bukit Peninsula over the next three days. You will be dusting off memories, looking at it again. Your first visit here was 28 years ago, when things were different.

It’s low tide. You start to walk. You are living in Bali now. Three years under your belt.

An expat. Drawn to this far-off place, far from home, because of the bizarre freedom it offers. And because you have never been able to shake her call. Like a glorious courtesan, she calls you, makes you feel special, makes you feel like you are the only one on earth that can love her. Even though millions of others can have her too. And they do. Any time they like.
You are drawn to Bali and the Bukit Peninsula because there are no rules here. Watch your back, make the right friends, keep under the radar, don’t make a fuss, let it be, get along, smile, make friends, but keep the locals at a certain distance. And forget the golden rule.

Nobody treats anybody the way they would like to be treated here. Get that straight, mate.

And you know that there is a strange beauty in that. It’s every man, woman and child for themselves. Survival, but with unlimited fun, perfect waves, spiritualism, outrageousness and the freedom of taking care of ones self, without anyone sticking their nose in your business. Unless, of course, you fuck-up. Then it’s all over. As sure as a popped balloon. Complete with the noise. If not the Kerobokan jail, then surely the airport. Never to return.

But you love the risk. Bali is Dodge City with palm trees. And you, the Gambler.

You know you can be anyone you want to be here. You can re-invent yourself. Or just be who you always were with no trouble from nobody. No government, no cops, no hassles. All smiles. As long as you are aware that here the smiles are like icebergs, where unimaginable dangers lurk below. Romantically, philosophically, physically. Good luck. As long as you keep your nose clean, don’t misstep, and thank the spirits everyday whether you believe in them or not…you just might make it. Watch your back. Ain’t no rights. Plenty of wrongs.

Only savvy will see you through. From the booze-addled, sex brutalized carnival of the construction site formerly known as Kuta Beach, to the eat, pray, love of the creaking bamboo forests filled with monkeys and birds and spirits of the past that you can actually see from time to time. It has been 28 years since your first visit. Bali has been intertwined with your fate, your place in life. Your station in life. You are here.
You reach the bottom of the cliff, barely; the swinging rope section was a little hairy. You walk. Crunching along in the seashell sand. Your feet covered in mittens of the stuff. That has never changed. You can see the hooptydoodle of modern Uluwatu up ahead. The cliff sagging under the weight of the astonishingly irresponsible real estate development. The beer soaked warungs, the beer soaked bars, the beer soaked resorts, the beer soaked infinity pools, the beer soaked sewage, the beer soaked litter and the paper money that drives it all. Scads of paper money.

You can remember a time when there was only three warungs. So it goes. Surf Colonialism.

Surfers. Such shallow, selfish thinkers. Short of slaughtering people, as bad as the Dutch. The surf’s not bad, only thirty-five guys out. It is off-season after all. You’ll put in at the cave. Grab a wave and make your way to Padang Padang for the night. You can see the Bukit white kids are out. Their white skin standing out amongst the brown. There is always brown skin in the line-ups now. That is one thing that has changed for the better. The locals have taken this place back from the invaders. Not the Dutch, the English nor the Japanese could take this place forever. Why should it be any different for the western surfers? We could only hold the place so long. Too much treasure.

You see the great Jim Banks take off with his boy, Harley, on the same wave. You guess Harley would be about thirteen years old. Just like his other white mates out there. Luca Carlisle, Luan Huberman, Dyou Worawong and Max Desantis. They live here too. Growing up with their expat parents. Most of them single parents. Bali is not a place you go to live as a white person, it’s a place you end up. The kids are growing up in the shadow of the temples. You know that much. Like the Lost Boys of Peter Pan they live on an enchanted island shrouded in magic, steeped in the mystical at every turn. And danger, yes, there is danger on land and sea for them. Massive swells their Captain Hook. Uluwatu their Wendy. Little Bingin their Tinkerbell. Their lives a melange of languages, mixed blood, exotic scents, monsoons, brown skin, bigotry, jealousy and phantasmic surfscapes. Their playground the best waves in the world. They breathe in the belonging to a place that will never belong to them. Never belonging, but always owning up to it. Paddling out day after day into international line-ups of every creed and color on earth. Rubbing shoulders with their heroes, the Indonesian greats and the silly international surf movie stars. They have backstage passes to every party, every contest, every happening. Thirteen years old and already familiar with the taste of the beer and lipstick. Kuta sees to that. They are growing up as a man-child cadre, they stick together, stay close, relate, compete now and then. They want to be champions all. That’s the ticket here. Then you don’t have to be a real estate agent. Champions of the world they want to be. An almost impossible dream on an island where the local surf brands don’t sponsor little white kids. White pegs trying to fit into a brown hole. Still, they live in a dream that takes guts. Carving out their place while delicately balanced on the tightropes of mixed culture. Carving out their place. Carving.
You put in at the Uluwatu cave. You look back inside its cavernous walls. It breathes back at you. It always has. No matter what, no matter what anyone says, still the most exotic entry point into any line-up in the world. This mysterious cave, a surf star itself, held in your imagination for twenty-eight years now. You’ve paddled out through her when she was a maelstrom of tangling sea snakes with your heart in your throat. And you have swum in her crystal clear pools with exotic topless beauties. And your heart was in your throat then too.

You have honored her. Entered her like you would a church. The hush of the place is something you always remember. Everyone talks in whispers in the Uluwatu cave. Japanese, Indonesian, Korean, Russian, Aussie and American. Hushed. You have never heard so much as a shriek from a child inside her dripping, bat-laden overhangs. From her old wooden ladder days to her modern Dr. Seuss cement stairs you have loved her.

Just the other day you paddled out from within her into the crowded line-up with twenty other fellas. White and brown alike. You all paddled out and sat beyond the line-up and held hands in a big circle. Here, with the hapless Eco Surf Rescue Uluwatu non-profit guy, you promised to keep the place clean. To honor the water. You remember everyone, once the circle broke up, skipped the ceremony up in the Edge Bar on the cliff where Rip Curl’s USD5000.00 check was presented. Everyone instead just tore into the line-up where a clean four-foot swell was running. A mad, hungry line-up. After all, you had all just spent fifteen precious minutes away from the waves, holding hands in a big circle with a bunch of other men promising to keep things clean around the place. A guy sure could use a barrel after all that time spent like that.

The thought makes you smile and you huff a laugh to yourself as you jump off the edge of the green reef and stroke as hard as you can to miss the oncoming set over the racetrack reef section. You feel the weight of the backpack for the first time. The trouble it’s going to cause you. You make it out and sit up and watch Jim Banks swoop by you, front hand cupped like an offering, eyes as intense as when he was a boy. And you knew him as a boy.

You look at the young kids in the line-up and hope they realize some kind of shit. Knowing that if they realize some shit, then maybe the Bukit stands an even chance.

And you think, if only everybody realized that it was all about water. If only everybody realized that the sea is the home of all water. Every drop of it. That all water is simply off on a journey unless it is in the sea. That it is homesick and that it fights with all its will to get home. Water, whose memory is perfect and who is forever trying to get back to where it was. The sea. Life-giving water. Evaporated from the sea, kidnapped, up into the pregnant clouds, sailing inland to the hills and mountains, disgorging their magnificent bounty, falling upon the riches of the earth, and then moving, racing, running, following her secret paths of least resistance, roiling, running, flowing, always headed home. A raindrop becomes a rivulet, a creek, a stream, a river and then, finally, the sea and home.

And then us. Waiting for her. Floating on the edge of water’s home, playing in her sea waters. When just below our feet it is her returning, filtered fresh water that carves our reefs into magnificent, crescent sculptures, refracting the sea’s power, allowing us to ride within the sea’s hollows. Providing to the end.

You hope at least these white kids out at Uluwatu realise this. That they realise that they ask everything from her. Everything. And that she asks nothing of them. And you hope these kids realize how all the grown-ups on earth, with all their great advice and rules and truths, have treated the ocean: like a global garbage can. And you hope these white kids figure out how to change things. Make it worth money to someone to clean up the water.

Because the only way things ever change in this fucked up world is to make it worth money to someone. Anyone. Because there is only one real problem in this world. We think we have time.

And you think, thousands have lived without love, but none without water. And you think, must these kid’s world never know the worth of water until the well runs dry? And you hope the next generation you are looking at realizes that the cure for anything is salt water.

Be it sweat, tears or the sea. Every drop they drink, every breath they take, they are connected to the sea. No matter where they are on Earth.

The Ocean. A body of water occupying two thirds of a planet that these we are told was made for man…who has no gills. No water, no life. No green. No blue. You hope these kids realize this.

Because your fucking generation has fucking failed to.

Padang Padang – 11th Jan, 2012, 09:30

Yesterday, you had made it into the small cove of Padang Padang on dusk. Past the roaring reef, hollow as usual, about three foot. The tattooed Russian bodyboarders just lording over the place. Spending more time in the tube than any conventional surfer could ever imagine. The wave just a Flowrider to them. You smiled at one of the Russians after his outrageous tube ride. Across the cultures. He flopped back out. He saluted. You saluted back. Connection. This place was anyone’s game these days. Da.

You had made shore and walked up to your favorite warung. The one with the ninety-year-old Ibu that has served nasi goreng to the greatest surfers in the world. Since 1969.
You had negotiated a small price and you had pitched your tent on the rattan covered massage table next to the dripping cliff wall. You had bought three warm beers and then you had filled your thermos with the water dripping from the limestone cliffs an arm’s reach away. Ibu hadn’t bat an eye. She knew of your eccentric behavior. Her thirty-five year old granddaughter had told her all about it a long time ago. You had drank deeply of the warm beer and of the water. Both had tasted as earthy and fresh as your own blood. At midnight the hissing lanterns had been turned down, the darkness had been complete. Walking waist deep in the ocean, you had urinated. Returning the water to the endless cycle. You had rinsed off the sand on your feet at the warung with the ice water long melted in the cooler full of clinking beers. You had slipped into your tent to sleep. The thirty-five year old granddaughter had slipped into your tent as well. As she had done before, long ago, in 1996, when you were making a Hollywood film here at Padang Padang.

This was before her two kids and the deadbeat Norwegian husband and all her troubles. Before she was forced to return from the land of snow and sell sarongs again on the beach to sweaty Germans. Her kids scrabbling it out with the rest of the urchins. A cycle as endless as water itself in this place.
You had asked her why, why, after all this time, she had returned to you this night. And she had whispered into the night, into your face, onto your lips, that there were no mosquitoes in your tent and that it had been cold lately. And that had seemed enough. As natural as a heartbeat you had held her close and dozed through the rainy night. The smell of her skin a dark, roasted coconut. Dawn. Different than anywhere else on the island. No roosters on the beach. She is gone. Her coconut scent a floating apparition. A ghost. Or maybe proof. Old Ibu has more nasi goreng waiting for you in her spitting, battered iron skillet. Philosophical, Old Ibu rests her hand on the back of your neck for a long moment, looking out to sea. Remembering the big generator you secretly had given her family when the Hollywood movie cleared out back in 1996. The generator that had given her family a small fortune. A better warung. A life here. A gentle pat on the neck and Ibu is gone too. You pack up and grab your board like a lance. A little ashamed of what you had done during the night, but a little proud too. Like all men.
Now you shoulder your waterproof backpack, take to the water. The surf has dropped.

Still absolutely perfect at 24 inches. You paddle out through the channel, remembering how different it was the last time you were here. And about that 6 o’clock set that had become Bukit Lore. You remember. At first it was thought to be a cloud. But then it was moving too fast. It was 17th October, 2011 around 18:00. And the Bukit was about to be slammed by the biggest set of waves in living memory. All that day the Bukit was as big and as good as it gets. And no place on the planet was better than Padang Padang. Not everyone wanted a piece of it, but the luminaries were all there. Made Bol Winada Adi Putra, standing tall, Mustofa Jeksen at play in his Spiderman mask, Rizal Tanjung, the whole damn world was there. Jason Childs tear-assing around on his ski with his faithful Man-Friday, Made, snapping photos like mad. The Balawista lifeguards at the ready, oiled tourists gawking and set after perfect set pouring over the reef under a blistering hot sky. By noon most had howled themselves hoarse. By 17:00, most had gone in, not able to lift their arms for one more. But by 18:00 those that remained witnessed the unforgettable.

Made Lana, at outside corner Uluwatu was the first to deal with the great waves. He dropped into history. At Padang Padang, three minutes later, no one was prepared. The only guys that stood a chance were Jason Childs and Made on the ski. They had just cleared the top of the first giant when it roared and shut down the entire bay behind them, bypassing the Padang Padang reef and channel and roiling into one long serpentine hydraulic monster to Impossibles. Bingin became no more than a shorebreak. Dreamland was non-existent, Balangan dismissed. Jimbaran bay awash. Surfers no more than tsunami victims at this point. And Jason Childs and Made and the Balawistas were out until dark, effecting rescues. It was estimated at 13 broken leashes. And it was said that even an airplane taking off at the airport had its wings soaked with the offshore spume of the great waves that washed ashore and expired at the end of runway 284.
So you paddle out, remembering, through the innocent Padang Padang channel, past the reef, out into deep water. You sit up on your board. Looking back at the white sands of Padang Padang, the beauty of the cove, the perfection of it, you wish it well. Knowing that for the rest of your life, for all your life, it will remain the most Goddamned romantic place on your earth. As it has been since 1996. And you wonder if you need to thank Hollywood for that. Then you belly down, adjust the backpack, hang a right and start making your way north, down through the Impossibles line-up. North. Toward a place you were personally responsible for destroying.

Bingin – 11th Jan, 2012, 22:40

You pitch your tent on the beach in exactly the same spot that you photographed from 26 years ago. You had to hike in then. The place only a rumor. It was a hot hour and fifteen minutes down a limestone path through a dry jungle back then. You had followed a little boy who carried you and your mate’s boards on his head. An impossible load. You couldn’t have done it. You had come out onto the beach at what would become Dreamland. Not a thing there. Not a soul. A sparkling creek, inviting, emptying into a turquoise sea.
In the distance, the prize. The most perfectly shaped short lefthand wave on the planet.

You were working for Surfer magazine then. You shot three photos and then you and your mate started running for it. The little boy keeping pace easily with your boards. You built a small shelter on the beach and for the next 8 days surfed Bingin with no more than four white guys at a time. When you filed your story two weeks later with Surfer magazine, the exodus began. The best shaped, most friendly wave on the Bukit. Uncrowded perfection. The dream.

Later that year you had found yourself at the Action Sports Retailer show in Long Beach, California. You had sold one of the photos to the Prolite Surfboard luggage company.
It was one of the first three shots you took that day that depicted the little boy, surfboard Prolite bags piled on his head, perfect empty surf peeling in the distance against an impossibly exotic background. Prolite had turned it into a billboard on the front of the Long Beach Convention Center. Inside the great hall another giant light box, as tall as a canoe, shone through the masses. Crowds were gathered before the photo. Dreaming. Planning.

You remember being proud at the time.

You are tired now from the day. You slip into your tent up on the rocks at Bingin. It is 22:40. A local cliffside hotel owner with a hard looking armed security guard rousts you like a roadside bum. They tell you that you either have to stay at one of their cliffside hotel and spa’s for two hundred bucks a night, or you have to clear out. You pack up and paddle out into the night. Karma.

Balangan – 12th Jan, 2012, 19:59

Dreamland had just been too hard to look at as you paddled into the beach under the cover of night. That giant, grey, shoddy cement edifice gouged clumsily into the north cliff. A real honest to God hatchet job of a big fuck-off ugly hotel and bar. Crassly re-named “The new Kuta Beach: The Bali you remember.” Good God, you thought, meaning the Bali we live in now is gone? Who in the fuck could have possibly thought that that was the right thing to say?

You pitch your tent near the creek mouth, up against the south hill. Composing yourself to sleep for the second time that night. You fall asleep remembering the days of yore. The cool little warungs of Dreamland beach, cleaner than anywhere else on the island. All gossamer, swaying mosquito nets over cool, crisp, bleach scented sheets. The open warungs, the open beds, the cool green surf, the icy Coca Cola’s. The talcum sand. The photographers from around the world that would come to shoot fashion magazine covers. The light reflecting off the limestone cliffs unique in all the world. Nothing like it. Life on a beach through a filtered light. All forever young. Now a bruised monstrosity of grey cement, varicose veined, ten-dollar margaritas. Rattling, giant tour buses waiting like a sad herd of pachyderms in the parking lot, chugging exhaust into the atmosphere for hours. Machines and drivers both hopeless beasts of burden. And you. Bastard. You helped start it all with your ego photographs.

And now here you lie on the Balangan point. Having paddled down mid-day. You had left an offering at Dalan Pura, Balangan’s powerful temple, dug into the cliff. Trying to make sense of something. Complete with her swooping bats and a single, eternal light bulb illuminating the Hanuman Monkey God deity back in the recesses of the cave. Mystery had filled you.

Wonder. What must the spirits think? What do you think?
You had a few waves, a little crumbly, while an Italian photographer was doing a photo shoot on the beach with the two most famous fashion models in the world. No one seemed to notice. The natural barefoot beauty of the Balinese women in the warungs eclipsing the fashion model’s gross, painted, commercial facade. Their false smiles. Tittering, insincere. Beauty as greed. As money. Paper money. Now in your tent. Early evening. On the north headland of Balangan cove. Bali’s most forgotten beauty. A stunning crescent beach. You didn’t even bring a camera this time. Instead, you deliberately chose the most exposed site you could. Facing the twinkling lights of Kuta and the roaring Airport runway a mile away.

The great modern terminus of the Bukit Peninsula. One-hundred-and-six flights a day.

You watch for a while, rain dripping through your eyelashes and onto your lips. Thinking about how peaceful Kuta looked from a distance. Of course, you think, a herd of rhinoceros would appear the same.

You had to peg your tent down. Not like you. Not a smart camp. Exposed as you are to the sky, a driving rain, monsoon winds and the spirits. A penance. You tried to drift off to sleep on the hard, volcanic ground. Another penance. The farmer of this land gives you a wide berth. So do the cows. As they would any crazy demon. Tomorrow you plan to paddle around the corner, with your waterproof backpack, to Jimbaran Bay. Past the Five Seasons resort carved into the south cliff. Past the last remaining beach warungs. You plan to make shore and stand upon the exact spot in the sand where the main blast of the 2005 Bali bombings erupted within the beachside restaurants and where 21 innocent human beings had become bloody rags. Though 23 died, no one really wants to count the terrorists.

And you stare at the sky from your tent and you plan to pray for forgiveness when you get there. Because you know that wherever you live is your temple, if you treat it like one.
Because you know there is still hope for this place called the Bukit. Because the eyes of the surfing world are watching Bali now in a whole new light. Because though the outside world may be able to blow out a candle, it cannot blow out a fire. Which is why here in Bali, you think, you must continue to fan the dreams into flame and care for this place as the precious gem it is. You must try. You have no choice. In many ways you created this place.

You are a western surfer. And like all western surfers, you have been an asshole to this place. You plan to take the dream seriously again. You must. After all, like the sound of the gamelan, you can’t unring a bell.

First published in Tracks magazine in March, 2012.